Download from Youtube #1

There are nearly countless ways to download Youtube videos and save them to your computer. In the future I’ll cover some of the many, but today I’m going to focus on ClipGrab:

ClipGrab is free, downloadable software that works with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. While its primary focus is downloading Youtube videos, it can download streaming video from Vimeo, Dailymotion, Facebook and many others. ClipGrab was my go-to software immediately after switching from Windows to Linux: it was very simple and worked well to save Youtube videos to my hard drive.

How ClipGrab Works

Like other software, ClibGrab monitors your computer’s clipboard. If you want to download a Youtube video, be sure ClipGrap is open and just copy the video page URL to your clipboard:

Depending on your settings, it may start downloading automatically or it may prompt you for the save location and give you the option to change the file name.

ClipGrab Settings

ClipGrab is really simplistic with very few options, and here are the settings I prefer to use:

ClibGrab – Limitations

ClibGrab will not download entire Youtube playlists. I think it used to, but I never intentionally used it, and I’ve tried recently and it doesn’t recognize the playlist URL. I know jDownloader will download Youtube playlists, and if there’s a Youtube tutorial available, it’ll be on our jDownloader-related pages.

If you download different videos with the same name and you do not manually change the name of the new file (you can get a prompt, depending on your settings) ClipGrab will overwrite the older file.

Downloading Streaming Video with ClipGrab

ClipGrab is a solid program that you can use to download video or audio (mp3) from sites like Youtube. It’s probably not the most ideal tool for regular, frequent downloads, but if you just need a few Youtube videos saved to your hard drive every once in a while, it’s a perfect download tool for that type of use.